So Long, Deep Throat

It's no secret that I love politics. In fact, I'm so into politics, that it borders on nerdy. At a dinner party last month someone made a comment about a giant, scary rabbit. Bert and I simultaneously said "maybe it was the one that attacked Jimmy Carter." No one appreciated it, but we thought we were hilarious. Later on when someone else mentioned hockey moms, Bert and I both looked at each other and blurted out "lipstick" and laughed hysterically while the whole table looked at us quizzically. Tough crowd. After Palin's "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?" joke, the word "lipstick" will forever be linked with both hockey moms and pit bulls in my mind. So, when I looked at the New York Times online this morning and read about Mark Felt's death (aka Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate informant "Deep Throat") it brought back a memory from a couple of years ago.

Back in 2005 when Felt outed himself as Deep Throat, I was fascinated by the story. The revelation was huge. To me it was on par with having the question "who shot JFK?" answered (that is one great political mystery that remains). I'd always loved "All the President's Men" (if you haven't yet seen it, you should) and now that Deep Throat was out in the open I wanted to know more.

Around the same time, I was looking through our library catalog online at some of the most frequently requested DVDs. I stumbled upon the title "Inside deep throat" and requested it right away. Now I could learn even more about Mark Felt and his involvement with the Watergate investigation. When the request was ready for me to pick it up, I was thrilled to obtain it. Imagine my disappointment when I found the DVD and could immediately see from the cover that its content was not what I had originally conjured up in my mind. If I had only read the description online before hastily requesting to check the DVD out of the library: "Explore the secrets behind the sensational adult film. This film examines the politics and the payoffs, the porn stars, and the persecution of the cultural phenomenon that remains just as highly controversial today as when Deep Throat debuted in 1972."

And that is how my innocent political obsession led me to request a documentary about a porno flick (I think the official name for that genre is "pornumentary"). Needless to say, I left the DVD on the shelf and declined to actually check it out of the library. And to this day, I'm a little sad that it wasn't a documentary about Mark Felt, the anonymous informant with the porn-inspired pseudonym.